For Henri Matisse, drawing was an exercise as personal as it was essential to his art, and even for his late abstracted figures he worked from live models. With notes by Norbert Wolf in English and German, this book reproduces 35 of Matisse's nude figure drawings in color, presenting them as though they are bound in the artist's own sketchbook, tied closed with a red silk ribbon. The black and white and subtly colored sketches reveal the quality of Matisse's lines, their confidence and ease, as well as the intensity between artist and model.